10 coolest superheroes

We’re excited about Iron Man 2, out this week, because the trailer is so very cool. It got us thinking – who are the coolest superheroes on screen?

By
Laura Chubb
27 April 2010

1 Iron Man: Obviously. What could be better than someone as enviably cool as Robert Downey Jr playing a mechanised millionaire superhero sans the Batman brooding, but with a wicked sense of fun instead? He even has a ready-made theme tune from Black Sabbath. A hundred thousand cool points, sir.

2 Hit Girl: A merciless 11-year-old girl with a filthy mouth? Right on. We’re guessing her entrance line will be cut from the UAE version of Kick-Ass. She’s so cool, she’s censored.

3 Spider-Man: The geekery of Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker just makes his alter-ego Spider-Man even cooler by contrast.

4 Rorschach: Watchmen’s anti-social crusader is so uncool, he’s cool. Pinstripe trousers, a dubious trench coat and a sense of social justice sound like the makings of a pretty dull superhero, but Rorschach’s anti-cool attitude, frankly psychopathic fighting style and strangely moral code make him a complex character of the intriguingly cool variety.

6 Neo: The all-black outfit and killer kung-fu moves are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to The Matrix superhero’s super-cool armoury. The man can dodge bullets! He performs a sequence of cartwheels while simultaneously machine-gunning a security team to pieces! We can’t even do a cartwheel, dammit.

7 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Controversial because she was far cooler in the TV show (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, right) than she was in the movie. But she’s still a ditzy blonde chick who turns out to be a devastatingly effective ass-kicker of the undead.

8 Batman: We resisted at first because Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is such a serious, ‘oh, the weight of the responsibility’ type. But he has cool gadgets, a cool car, and a cool hideout (converted caves are cool). But Bale, what is with your seriously uncool gravelly Batman voice? ’Tis silly.

9 Hancock: Of course, the film ultimately sucked, but we liked the bestubbled, whiskey-soaked Will Smith who saved people whether they liked it or not.

10 The Bride: Any girl that can single-handedly dispose of a gang called the Crazy 88s using only a samurai sword is cool by us. We think that fetching yellow Kill Bill jumpsuit is cool, too.
Not cool
Here are some superheroes that are definitively not cool. Find them shuffling awkwardly in a corner and looking at the floor at the annual superhero social.

Superman
So not cool. Clark Kent is a sap and Superman isn’t much better. Where are the gadgets? The kung-fu moves? Who fights crime with their itty bitty briefs out?

Invisible Boy
This superhero from Mystery Men says he can become invisible, but only when no one is looking.